I wrote last week, “Let us know if you enjoy reading her work or crumpling it up into a ball and tossing it across the room.” And many of you have. We’ve heard that Ann Coulter is a vile bomb-tosser who adds nothing to our Sunday Opinion pages and will prompt you to skip reading them entirely if we continue publishing her. We’ve also heard that Ann Coulter is a breath of fresh air for readers who long abandoned hope of this paper printing anything of value to conservative readers, aside from the obits.

Coulter fans: Welcome back to our Opinion pages, where she’ll be popping up every now and then. We encourage you to stay awhile and look around. Even though not everyone in Humboldt County agrees with you, it’s good to see what other people are thinking, if only to prepare yourself for your really annoying relatives at Thanksgiving. (You know which ones we’re talking about.)

Coulter foes: There are plenty of other voices on this page for you to enjoy. Even though not everyone in Humboldt County agrees with you, it’s good to see what other people are thinking, if only to prepare yourself for your really annoying relatives at Thanksgiving. (You, too, know exactly which ones we’re talking about.)

Even if we never ran another Coulter column, by reading this paper, you’re contributing to her paycheck. The same would be true if we hadn’t run Coulter at all — we buy a menu of content every year from syndicates. The syndicates pick who’s on the menu, and the syndicates get paid whether or not we publish all, one or none of their columnists. Sometimes they change the menu mid-year, and it’s not a la cart. If, for instance, I wanted to stop paying the syndicate that gives us Coulter, I’d lose Byron York, Cokie and Steven Roberts, Gene Lyons, Georgie Anne Geyer and Kathryn Lopez. That would be fine with some readers; other readers might disagree. We’re here for as many readers as possible.

That doesn’t mean we let just anything on the page. I’ve held or spiked columns local and syndicated from the left and the right and everywhere in between. Sometimes their “facts” just aren’t, and sometimes they go so far over the line, they make Coulter look like she’s acing the literary equivalent of a roadside sobriety test, one foot in front of the other.

All I can do at the end of the day is urge our readers — no matter who they can’t stand — not to throw the bathwater out with the crazy. And if you have a type of columnist you’d rather see, syndicated or local, name them. Better yet, prove that one columnist wrong — write a letter. We’d love to print it.

Marc Valles resides in Eureka and is managing editor of the Times-Standard. He can be reached at 707-441-0507.